Month: February 2017

Many churches do a great job with little kids – providing doting nursery workers and dedicated Sunday School teachers. But the older kids get, the harder it can be to engage and discipline them, particularly kids from tough backgrounds.

One of the thingsour church has done for the last few years is to add a Sunday night activity in addition to traditional Sunday morning Sunday school. We’d rather do something during the week, but sports and other competing activities just crowded out too many kids. This time parallels when older youth groups meet.

The upper elementary age group often becomes disenchanted with the activities of younger kids, so it’s important to give them something different and challenging. For example, here’s our format for this year’s MEGABLAST, which meets from 6pm to 8pm:

For the first half hour, they join older youth groups for a time of worship. Kids are invited to help lead worship as singers, musicians or leading movement to songs. There is often a structured activity, like writing out a sentence of praise to God, then everyone reading theirs out loud. In a setting with older role models and guided activities, worship is caught as well as taught.

The next half-hour is spent rehearsing a super-easy short drama that I write for them to present to their families at a monthly dinner. The dramas include narration that can be read, Scripture recitations and personal stories. We keep memorization to one or two lines per person so kids don’t get too stressed about performing. We want them to have fun, present truth and become confident speakers.

For the third half hour we break into boys’ and girls’ groups, with an adult leader. These groups read and discuss a Bible passage and pray together. There is a strong emphasis on good group process, with simple listening exercises at the beginning of each session. For example, we’ll get kids to share a highlight from their week, but first they repeat what they heard the last person say. It pays to insist on good process; to require only one person talking at a time. Good communication skills and behavior boundaries are crucial for diverse groups. When those are established, even kids from very different backgrounds will feel safe and open-up.

The final half hour is devoted to some crazy game that lets everyone run around our large building and make lots of noise. This is by far their favorite time, and when they relate most spontaneously.

We’re considering some other formats – maybe some in-home small groups next year, for example. But this structure has worked well for us, helping kids from different backgrounds to worship, learn, work and play together.

In early August our church throws a big party in its parking lot. There’s a stage with a good sound system, music, speakers, dancing. There’s free food and water. Civic organizations set up tables. There’s a bouncy house for kids, and a tent with a sign that says, “Free Pop if you Talk with us about Jesus for Three Minutes.”

I think the block party has done a lot to connect our church to people in the neighborhood who may not otherwise have come into the formidable stone edifice. We needed to get outside the building to show people that we cared about them.

Traditional church festivals are fund raisers, selling food and games to raise money for the church. But we wanted this party to exclude no one, including the 21 percent of our residents who live below the poverty level, so everything is free.

We also decided that we didn’t want it to be only about having fun; we wanted people to experience God’s love. Hence the “Jesus Tent,” with its offer of free pop for a brief conversation. We wanted to create a space where people would feel free to have conversations about faith. So we made our signs, filled coolers with drinks, set up chairs, prayed, and waited to see what would happen.

The results were delightful. People of all ages came and eagerly talked of their faith, their doubts, their grievances with the church, their needs for prayer, their testimonies of the goodness of God. Intense, personal conversations about spiritual things, which so rarely flow for most of us in the routine of our lives, flourished in a setting that simply gave permission. Sometimes, when people were willing, the conversations ended in prayer.

Lots of children came, so we have expanded our conversations to include activities such as reading a Bible story, or making a bracelet with beads that represent key truths of the gospel.

I recall meeting Shauna, and her son Shallum, new in town, the first year we put our signs out (We didn’t have a tent then, just a table.) They have been coming to church ever since. Shauna often helps out at our front desk, and Shallum brings more friends to youth group than any other kid. I can’t imagine our church without them.

Other encounters I will never forget:

The skeptical girl in her young teens who wanted to know how she could know that God is really there.

The boy, around 10, who told one of our high school volunteers that his mother had just died the week before. It was precious to see the older boy praying for strength and comfort for the younger boy.

The young woman in her 20s who wanted to stand strong in her faith and realized that this meant she was going to have to distance from some destructive friends. She accepted our prayers with hugs of gratitude.

The four siblings who responded to our invitation to come to church and have been showing up ever since, even though their parents don’t come.

I’m so glad we started the block party, to show our neighborhood that God’s people care about them whether they come to church or not. And I’m glad we have the ‘Jesus Tent’, unsophisticated though it may be, because it gives an open invitation for people to draw closer to God.

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